The history of Altarnun

A new stone inn replaced one on this road since 1547

Jamaica Inn is a stone coaching inn on Bodmin Moor, now run as a hotel with a pub, a museum, and a gift shop. The current building went up in 1750, replacing an older inn that had stood on this road since 1547. It sat on the old coach route between Launceston and Bodmin, where horses were changed and travelers broke their journey across one of the bleakest stretches of moor in Cornwall. In 1778, the owners added a coach house, stables, and a tack room, built onto the main building in an L-shape. Much of that work still stands.

People often assume the name comes from smuggled rum, but the real story is about land, not liquor. Historians credit the name to the Trelawney family, local landowners who held government posts in Jamaica in the 1700s. For a stretch it was even called the New Inn before the name changed.

The moor around it became smuggling country. Through the 1700s, smugglers used roughly a hundred hidden paths across Bodmin Moor to move contraband inland, avoiding customs men along the coast. Jamaica Inn sat near the middle of that network, a legal house doing a brisk and sometimes shady trade in illegal goods. Violence between smugglers and revenue officers was common on this coast. In 1768, not far off at Porthleven, an excise officer named William Odgers was murdered by a smuggling gang for doing his job.

Local story also tells of a stranger drinking alone at the inn around 1911. Someone called him outside into the dark. He left his drink unfinished and never came back. His body turned up on the moor the next day, and no one was ever charged.

The inn went dry for decades under Methodist influence

By 1880, Methodism had taken hold across Cornwall, and Jamaica Inn turned temperance, serving no alcohol at all for decades. Bert Horrell took over as tenant landlord in 1923, running it through the years that produced du Maurier's novel and its sudden fame. The inn changed hands again in 1962, sold on to new owners as its reputation grew with every new edition of the book and every new film.

A lost rider's night here inspired a smugglers' novel

Daphne du Maurier rode out onto the moor one afternoon with her friend Foy Quiller Couch, and lost her way as darkness came down. Daphne du Maurier's horse found the road home and brought her to Jamaica Inn's door, and she sheltered there for the night. She came back the following year, visiting nearby Altarnun and its church of St. Nonna with Foy. The stay stuck with her. In 1936, she published a novel called Jamaica Inn, set on this same moor around 1815, about a young woman drawn into a smugglers' and wreckers' world run out of an inn much like this one. Du Maurier herself called the real building "hospitable and kindly, a temperance house on the twenty mile road between Bodmin and Launceston." By then the inn had gone dry, serving tea instead of rum. Alfred Hitchcock filmed an adaptation in 1939, and the story has been retold on screen since. Some tellings lean on the old legend of Cornish wreckers luring ships onto the rocks with false lights, though nothing firm ties that practice to this stretch of coast.

Listed stonework now houses a hotel, pub and museum

The building earned Grade II listed status in 1988, protecting its 1750 stonework and its 1778 stable range for good. At some point the novelist Alistair MacLean, famous for adventure thrillers of his own, held ownership of the inn. Today Jamaica Inn runs as a hotel with 36 bedrooms, a pub, a gift shop, and a museum devoted to smuggling and to du Maurier's work. The Smuggler's Bar keeps its low oak beams and a wide granite fireplace, much as it would have looked to travelers waiting out a Cornish storm two centuries ago. The Coaching Inn Group bought the hotel in August 2022. That same year, the inn's owner banned fox hunts from the property, saying the association cost more business than it brought in.